The Small Crimes of Tiffany Templeton

by Richard Fifield

  “She’s an artist,” my father always said. “She’s supposed to be a mess.”

  Lou Ann Holland was an artist, but I don’t think she ever sold anything. I always thought artists wore black, but Lou Ann wore a men’s V-neck T-shirt and white canvas pants, her limbs sharp edges against the draping fabric. It seemed odd to wear white when you worked with so much paint, but her clothes served another purpose: to clean her brushes. She worked with oil paints, and the tail of her T-shirt hung close to her knees, heavy with stains.

  Lou Ann overdosed on Thanksgiving. She lived alone, so I was never really sure who found her. Maybe she called 911 on herself. She was pretty neurotic. We had already eaten, and Ronnie and his family had gone home for the evening, excused themselves as quickly as possible. It was a surprise when he came back, an hour later, bursting through the door.

  “Ambulances at Lou Ann’s,” he said. “Sirens and everything.”

  “Figures,” said my mother. “Artists are so dramatic. If she wanted to be invited over for Thanksgiving, all she had to do was ask. She didn’t need to shoot herself in the head.”

  I don’t know why my mother immediately jumped to that conclusion. Lou Ann didn’t seem the type to have a gun, and I knew that most tortured artists drowned themselves or swallowed poison.

  I was close. It was a different kind of poison.

  “Overdose,” reported Lorraine, who had also returned to our house, baby in tow, as we heard the sirens wail and fade as they sped away.

  “Overdose,” Lorraine repeated. “At my house, that usually happens on Christmas.”

  We watched silently as my father grabbed his coat and keys. “I’m going to the hospital,” he declared.

  “Of course you are,” said my mother. “I used the good dishes today, Ronald. If you leave our family celebration to dash off to be a Good Samaritan, I will throw all the leftovers in the trash. No midnight turkey sandwiches. I guess it takes a junkie to teach you how to practice portion control.”

  My father said nothing, which was not surprising. I was the one that had to clean up the kitchen anyway, and I would stash leftovers in the refrigerator. My mom never opened it—she was on a mission to qualify for her bariatric surgery.

  As his car drove away, my mother shook her head. “That big weirdo is probably getting her stomach pumped.” I could hear the jealousy in her voice.

  My father returned just before midnight, and my mother had been asleep for hours. I made him the turkey sandwich and joined him at the kitchen table. He was pale, and nervous.

  “Thank you,” he said. “The cafeteria at the hospital is closed for the holiday.”

  “What kind of pills did she take?”

  “Painkillers,” he said, after swallowing. He considered his next words very carefully, paused with his half-eaten sandwich in the air. “It’s not like her, really. Painkillers. She likes red wine and marijuana.”

  “She’s an artist,” I said. “Of course.”

  “She wouldn’t tell the doctors or the cops where she got them. She wouldn’t tell me, either.”

  “Why would she tell you? Is a drug overdose something you have to put on your taxes?”

  “No,” he said. “She’s not a drug addict. She’s an artist, and sometimes, artists have really bad days.”

  “Thanksgiving sucks,” I said and took his empty plate to the sink.

  “I just wish she picked up the phone,” he said. “I’m only two minutes away.”

  “Dad, you’re not the suicide hotline. I think you need training for something like that. If she was having a bad day, I guess you could have dressed up like a clown and brought her balloons or something.”

  “A clown,” said my father. That word brought the color back to his cheeks, and I watched him push back his chair. My mom only focused on the surgery, and I think there was no place for my dad on that path. He knew he would be rerouted, just like her stomach.

  I could tell he was angry. He shook his head and walked down the hallway to the master bedroom. I rinsed the dish, careful to get all the bread crumbs into the drain. My mother would look for evidence.

  As I wiped the dish dry and reached to replace it in the cupboard, it began shaking in my hand. Truth is like that sometimes. It hits you like a tremor, and then before you know it, it splits you apart like a fault line.

  My father was in love with Lou Ann.

  I never said a word. I think I liked the fact that my father kept something from my mother. He gave everything else away, to anyone who asked. He kept this for himself.

  When my father died, six months later, Lou Ann Holland finally painted the rusty and peeling metal siding of her rickety trailer house. My mother, of course, had something to say.

  “Mauve.” She slapped the dining table with her hand. “Who paints their house mauve? Jesus Christ.”

  I would have called it lavender and assumed it was supposed to match the pink peonies that only lasted two weeks. She knew colors, that was her passion.

  “She’s an artist,” I said, the only response I could think of.

  Chapter Eleven

  I COULD HEAR THE KIDS playing on the sand hill as I dug my arm through the juniper bush. I made sure nobody was watching as I slid out the typewriter case. I crouched down and unlocked it, pulled back one corner of the lid, peered inside. Everything was still there. It was light outside, and I did not want to be spotted, so I pushed it back inside the bush as quickly as possible. These things inside the box would not destroy me, but in four nearby trailer houses, they could explode like homemade pipe bombs.

  The sand hill rose up behind the north wall of the Laundromat, and a trail led through the rotten crab apple trees and under a chain-link fence that had never been repaired. Sand was a foreign thing in Gabardine, something they had in California, but here it was only used for the icy roads in our endless winters. The hill had been there for generations. This was where trailer park families had barbecues, where young couples got engaged. I guess it felt tropical, exotic.

  In reality, it was useful. During the worst days of winter, the highway department would bring their trucks at four o’clock in the morning, load up, and spread the grains out of a tiny chute in the back of a dump truck with a massive bed. When I was a kid, the trucks used to park here, but then the county built them a new garage, on the outskirts of town, right next to an old billboard for Waterbed Fred’s business.

  I sat at the top of the sand hill, queen of the mountain. Tough Tiff would not wear a tiara, but I was royalty, nonetheless. I would not be challenged. I would whip any of the little kids in a fistfight, but it would never come to that. They did not know about the short leash I was on, and they were still scared of me.

  From the top of the sand hill, you could see all of the trailer houses and most of the town. You could see all the way past the high school, all the way to the second-tallest thing in Gabardine, that billboard of Waterbed Fred’s face, most of the paint chipped away or faded, except for his mustache.

  Below me, I watched little boys build collapsing forts for their G.I. Joes and He-Men, and little girls built sets, a kitchen of sand, playing house, I guess. I hoped that they invented fathers. We had a lot of sand but a serious lack of fathers.

  The McGurty girls did not play house. Even though they were hundreds of feet away, they were so loud, I could hear every word. The sand cave they inhabited was an office, and the oldest McGurty sat behind a pile of sand shaped into a bar, her version of a desk. One by one, her little sisters would stand in front of her desk and hold out empty hands.

  The oldest McGurty was unimpressed by their humility. “I’m Mr. Francine! And your damn power bill is late!”

  I leaned against a pole sunk into a clump of concrete as big as one of the McGurty girls. This pole contained the remnants of a metal sign: No Trespassing. All around me, the sand hill was smoothed and mounded, but this po
le remained.

  May had arrived with unseasonably warm days but still frosted overnight. The sand stopped clumping with ice crystals by the time the sun hit the zenith. The days remained foreshortened, the sun setting before dinnertime. In this county, winter usually lasted through the end of April and occasionally all the way to June. This sun was a rare thing. The grass in the lawns was still brown, the trees bare, no leaves. The power lines and the flat faint blue sky were empty of birds.

  The dirty children tumbled down all around me, but I was left alone on the peak. I always kept a small notebook in the inside pocket of my jacket, and from another pocket I removed a pen. I cursed when I realized the ballpoint pen was filled with pink ink, barely legible. I did not own a pink ballpoint pen, I would never own a pink ballpoint pen, and I was pretty sure David had slipped it in my pocket just to annoy me.

  The pine trees atop the ridge glowed more fiercely. Low gray clouds moved rapidly from the south, sagging and lumpy but still skittering toward the sand hill, toward the trailer park. Those were snow clouds, and the undersides were lit with the tangerine glow of the sunset.

  I had nowhere to go. I was just as locked up in Gabardine as I had been in Dogwood. At least at Dogwood, the stories were interesting. I sat there for another twenty minutes, until I saw a figure crawling through the chain-link fence behind the Laundromat.

  Bitsy sat down on the sand next to me, spit tobacco into the sand. “Tough Tiff,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” I said.

  “I think it’s funny,” he said. “I know that weird, but it’s true.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare her.”

  “She needed it,” he said. “She forgot about my dad for a while.”

  “That’s good,” I said. I would say nothing else.

  We both watched as a trio of boys took turns sliding down the hill on the lid of a garbage can.

  “Do you want to make out?”

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  “I want to kiss you,” he said.

  “Okay. But spit that shit out.”

  He dug a finger into his bottom lip, hooked a wad of chew, flung it down toward the maintenance shed at the bottom of the hill. He grinned slyly and pulled me close. We kissed, and I could still taste the chew, wintergreen. I opened my eyes, and Bitsy’s eyelashes were long like a girl’s, jet black and fluttering as he concentrated. I wondered if he had ever kissed a girl before.

  He leaned back and opened his eyes. “That’s real nice,” he said. He dug a hand into the pocket of his black jeans. “You’re pretty rad.” All of a sudden, he was coy, kicked the sand near his feet.

  “Bye,” I said, but then he was grabbing me again and pulling me down the hill. Normally, I would have punched any boy that did this. But I’d never kissed any of my combatants. This was weird.

  At the bottom of the hill, the Quonset hut that once housed the sanding trucks still stood. The giant structure they had abandoned was covered in grime, decades of diesel exhaust. The windows were boarded up, even though they had long been shattered by my fellow trailer park delinquents.

  Bitsy leapt up on a thick ledge, and grunted as he pulled a two-by-four from a windowsill, and the nails shrieked as they sprung free.

  “Awesome,” he said. He didn’t offer to help me, just pushed himself through. I could hear his landing, as his feet took purchase on what sounded like a box of canning jars.

  I hoisted myself through the gap and swung a leg around the sill. I eased myself down, and indeed, it was a box of jars, a case of empty baby food.

  “You ever been in here?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s been empty for years. My mom says it’s a tax shelter for liberals.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” he said.

  “I don’t, either. Who ate all this baby food? Fucking weirdos.”

  Inside, the Quonset hut was an enormous cavern, reeking of diesel, the ghosts of snowplows. Bitsy yanked me to a torn green couch in one corner, the fabric stained from wet and dirty boots. I was not the type of girl to get yanked.

  An idea sprung into my head. “This place is perfect.”

  “I know,” he said. “Everybody does it here.” He leaned in to kiss me again, but this time I pushed him away.

  “No,” I said. “This is where we need to have the play.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the play,” he said. He reached across the couch, and I wish I could say he was tender, but he touched my face like he thought it was a football. He kissed me again, and now I was sure he’d never kissed anybody before.

  “It’s probably cheap real estate,” I said. “And lots of space for chairs. If David gets his way, he’s going to want those velvet rows, like at a real theater.”

  “I don’t know anything about real estate,” he said and kissed me again.

  I pulled away after a few moments. I wasn’t sure if we were going too fast. I wasn’t sure about any of this, really. “Maybe we could have a concession stand,” I said. “My mother might let us use the popcorn machine for the night.” He sighed and pulled me back toward him, and this time I felt his tongue. I couldn’t help but recoil, not because it was disgusting, but because it was new. He stared at me, expectantly.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I let Tough Tiff do the talking. “Your mouth tastes like chew,” I said. I sat there for a few seconds, expecting him to kiss me again, but he didn’t. His mouth turned down, and he looked away from me. “It’s not terrible or anything.” I would have liked to kiss him, but I think he was traumatized by my description of how his mouth tasted.

  When he didn’t kiss me, I left him there, zipped up my leather jacket in a hurry, hoisted myself up and out of the window.

  When I got to the Laundromat, I could hear him calling my name, but I just kept walking. It was almost dark, and my mother would be home soon.

  FROM THE DESK OF TIFFANY TEMPLETON

  My dad was the tax man of Gabardine, from January until the end of April, and sometimes during random months, for the frantic and delinquent. He prepared individual income tax returns and small business tax returns, and his office was our front porch. He had a favorite armchair, and balanced a piece of plywood on his knees to write on. He and his armchair guarded the trailer court. He had to be nagged by my mother to come inside. On days below zero, he sat uncomfortably at our kitchen table, and I know he hated every moment.

  During fire season, my mother also begged him to leave his beloved chair; the sky was thick with smoke and the sun burned bright red. He refused, so she tried to convince him to wear a surgical mask like the weird cashier at the grocery store.

  “It’s not good for you,” she always said. “You’ve already got breathing problems.”

  “I don’t have breathing problems,” my dad would respond. “I’m just fat.”

  He accepted his size. He was content in his armchair, carrying his own weight but always willing to lift more, taking the burden of income taxes away from an entire town. He was beloved. I know he must have been embarrassed by the things his size would not let him do, the things that he needed help with. When he got a flat tire, somebody from the garage had to come and remove the spare and change it in front of our house.

  I know my father did a lot of the taxes for free because housewives and dirty loggers came into our house on some afternoons, after I was home from school, before my mother was home from work. It was always rushed because my mother would have freaked out on these people. It was bad enough hearing her freak out about the pies or jars of jelly that they left behind as the only payment they could afford. The loggers didn’t bake or can, but when my father did their taxes, our freezers were always full of wild game, wrapped with white paper and scribbled on with black grease pencil. Even though our grocery bill was minuscule, it was not enough for my mother. My father’s lack of inc
ome was like a splinter in my mother’s pride, and she dug like a human needle. His kindness was yet another weakness, and she poked and poked, determined to not let it infect us.

  Adults have that saying about death and taxes. I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to happen at the same time.

  It was the eighth of May, and in Montana, that means the grass is green, but snow can fall any minute.

  My father had never been one of those sleepy fat people. I know you’ve seen them, napping after a meal, like a bear.

  As I approached the porch, I saw his chin sunk into his chest, so far down that the back of his neck was visible, and I knew right then and there. I bounded up the steps, and the porch barely shook, and that damn pile of mail slid from his knee.

  I didn’t call out his name. I didn’t do the thing you see in movies, where they shake the person and repeat their name, louder and louder, frantic. I stood in front of him and considered things. I guess I had always been waiting for it to happen. In my mind, he was always dying, smothered by his own body, suffocating every day in our quiet house.

  I considered things and stared at the back of his neck, so white and so unfamiliar to me. Envelopes and papers scattered around his feet, and I picked them up. I carried them inside and dropped them on the counter, and then I called my mother.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE QUONSET HUT WAS MY idea, but David was the one who thought of how to fund it. Of course, my mother was aware of the sand hill, knew about the Quonset hut, broken windows and baby food jars and all. I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother had also made out with boys in that airless, dusty space. It was hard to imagine such a thing. But she had been a teenager once, and she had been a teenager in Gabardine, and it was a rite of passage, I think. In my imagination, she lined up five boys at gunpoint and forced them to kiss her until she picked the very best one. This was how she chose new products from the truck of Waterbed Fred, a taste test, and I finished all the samples that she threw aside. Those boys were lucky. They could have been devoured, or they could have been slapped with a tiny sticker from the price gun.